ß/' {\ ß ìïÏ ' rr ll \ ! I 2ß 7 _ V / , / (I .......,...,. ) n ' . . ("f Ff I,r..) ,; f' ' , ) l .' _ ," "/ \. - J ,/, . { ,I, , _ .! =-, _' , "-i. .",' , \,- -. t> '!, .;::::: ,'\, .. f/ /. .# """,-. 'i/ ' í" -.' / II ':)'-'4" &: aW: ! , : r I , JJ :" - ---- /1 "" 'w -r-1 -j ,1" h ----, } 6\ "You know who's a bigpain in the ass? Europe. " . . played to date); and a bedroom that fea- tures lighted display cases and a wet bar. Gasping at the stars' enormous pads and rolling acres and their outsized fridges (empty, for the most part, except for the obligatory bottle of Cristal) and snick- ering at such monumental garishness and infantile taste is all right for the sub- twenty age group that "Cribs" aims at, but it's still not what we fans are after. What we yearn for may be contained in the question that every sportswriter keeps hearing from his readers: 'What's Wil- lie Mays" -or Phil Mickelson or Andy Roddick-"really like?" Willie, as it hap- pens, is cranky and private in person (he's seventy-four years old) and pass- ably complex, but this news, of course, is not what's wanted. The desired, almost the demanded, answer is that he's a great guy: he's exactly like us. The Times, on a recent Saturday, fea- tured an extended visit to the New York apartment of Tiki Barber, now in his ninth year as the featured running back for the New York Giants. Bar- ber, a known sports good guy, is thirty and on the edge of superstardom, and here he was, with that shaved head and sweet smile, at play with his twenty-one- month-old son, Chason, and then with his feet up on an ottoman, gabbing with his animated wife, Ginny. Their four- thousand-square-foot apartment has a twelve-foot- high trophy case, a flat- 26 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 9, 2006 screen TV in every room, and space for a private suite for Ginny's parents, but in the story it felt modest enough to allow a sports-fan reader to feel right at home, even familiar. Nice place, Tiki, but this striped, nail-head bench-what were you thinking? And that bedroom for Chason's three-year-old brother, A.J.-do you want a kid growing toward his teens staring at a mural every day where he's holding up a sign that says "Go Tiki #21!" C'mon! This sense of wry palship, a Schaden- freude dekorative, lasted for local fans right up until kickoff time, late that same afternoon, when Tiki Barber and the Giants took on the visiting Kansas City Chiefs at the Meadowlands, and beat them, 27-17, to put themselves one game away from clinching the Na- tional Football Conference East division. There was plenty of Tiki to watch and yell over. He is midsized and not partic- ularly fast as running backs go, but here he was, again cruising close to his block- ers and then finding the hole or the invis- ible seam and driving for yardage before disappearing under a vanload of tack- lers. The Giants scored a couple of field goals and a touchdown on a pass from Eli Manning to Amani Toomer, but the play of the day was a second -quarter run by Tiki, around the left side and then brilliantly back and forth between grasp- ing and flying frustrated Chief defense- men, forty-one yards, for a touchdown. He ran some more after that, driving in for the twenty-yard clinching touchdown late in the day-itwas night by now, and you kept your eye on his gleaming blue helmet in motion, always a little lower than the rest. In the end, he'd run two hundred and twenty yards from scrim- mage-and away from us, you might say-for a franchise record, and had compiled 1,577 rushing yards for the sea- son, breaking the team record he set last year. Great game, Tiki. Out of sight. -Roger Angell ACADEMICS DEPT. THE LATTE CLASS O n the train up from Philadelphia the other day, Bryant Simon, a professor of history at Temple Univer- sity, overheard two conversations about Starbucks. When he reached Penn Sta- tion, he made a pit stop at the Star- bucks at Thirty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue. Then he began walking to- ward Grand Central, to catch a Metro- North train uptown, and passed a group of kids on the street, also talking about Starbucks. ("I guess a lot of people like twelve-dollar coffee," one said.) He was headed for the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue: the site of Harlem's only Starbucks. Simon, who is forty-four, is writing a book-a cross between "Bowling Alone" and "Fast Food Nation," he hopes- about the world's largest, and seem- ingly unavoidable, coffee-shop chain, which he has called "the corner bar of the twenty-first century." Over the past year, he estimates that he's been to three hun- dred Starbucks outlets in six countries. He sits in Starbucks for at least twelve hours a week, observing. In the course of his research, Simon has detected the oc- casional regional variation-in Guada- lajara, for example, the Starbucks offers valet parking. But a few basic and univer- sal mores hold true: moms predominate in late morning, teens take over after 3 P.M., and strangers who are not moms or teens must never engage one another. At the 125th Street Starbucks, Simon